What I Did On My School Holiday

I just finished visiting some friends on Sulawesi, where there had just been an earthquake a few days before.

So, the earthquake’s epicenter was not far away from where I was staying (it hit just a day before I got into town), and there wasn’t any damage in town. However, the tremors caused some landslides that blocked the only road into the villages to the south of where I was, in an area called Lindu, which is a large national park. About six people were killed, though we don’t know the details.

I got here on Sunday, and a local man organized a bunch of supplies that we’d drive down to a small town on the way into Lindu, where a local nonprofit organization has a helicopter that could bring in the supplies to the village. To the government’s credit, they’d mobilized quite a bit of relief, and the army hiked in through the jungle to get to the village with some medical aid and food. They got together about 2000 kilos of rice, instant noodles, and other food supplies.

They let us in pretty quickly, and we were right in on the action, adding to the large supply dump that was waiting to be weighed and put onto the helicopter. It was a pretty massive undertaking. The entire surrounding area seemed to have turned out to both help and watch the show, because it’s not every day they get a whole group of military, Red Cross, and government types, plus a helicopter in the small village that was pretty well taken over to stage the relief work.

The helicopter was the only thing that outshone us bule, which was the most interesting experience of my life. Everyone took our pictures. And I mean everyone. Constantly. I’ve never been in that situation before, and it took me off guard a bit, but I just rolled with it and took pictures right back at them. I’ll probably post on what I’m calling “the bule effect” in more depth later.

All of that to say, this has been a bit of an unexpected adventure last week, and I really loved it. I go back at Christmas!